Year before now

With realignment they have opted to treat the ACC and Big12 as clearly second rate conferences that they don't respect at all (despite the ACC not losing any of their historical top teams (they just have both not been as good as usual, FSU and Clemson)

I think it really is more a factor in that the preseason top teams are not as good as they were supposed to be, and so the entire conferences are being "punished"